The present disclosure relates generally to electrical computers and digital processing systems and, more particularly, to remote data accessing using interconnected networks.
Both wireless technology and the Internet have, in recent years, enabled people to more readily intercommunicate than in previous decades when the telephone and courier services were the predominate forms of communication, These technologies offer new and previously unparalleled forms of communications. Wireless technology, for example, has evolved to include text and electronic mail messaging, in addition to providing voice services by cellular and satellite networks. Likewise, the Internet has given rise to prolific use of electronic mail, instant messaging, chat rooms and the like.
These technological advances have resulted in the convenience of being able to communicate at any time of day and from nearly any location. However, such systems have been designed for particular modes of communication, which are not suitable for all applications. Notably, no current communications medium allows persistent information to be distributed non-intrusively to recipients selected by access level and automatically organized. Examples of applications that may benefit from such a communication medium are personal relationship management, knowledge management, and content management.
For instance, many e-mail software packages allow a user to define of a group of users to which a message is to be transmitted, and may be included under a single group name. This approach has specific drawbacks, however. First, e-mail software sends a message directly to the recipients, which is intrusive on their time and resources. One would never, for example, send an e-mail to all of one's personal acquaintances to announce a small personal event, even though one may wish that all of one's colleagues were made aware of that event Second, e-mail software puts the burden of organizing received information onto the receiver. Although some tools exist for automatically categorizing incoming e-mails, these tools still require the user to explicitly develop a set of rules for organization, a task that is onerous enough that the vast majority users do it ineffectively or not at all. Third, e-mail software distributes information only once, at the time of writing of a message. This means that a sender must know ahead of time the complete set of recipients. If a new person is met after the message is sent, any information previously sent to others must now be manually resent to the new person. Further, this means that the sender cannot easily change the recipients after the message is sent, for example to exclude a user who was previously permitted to access the
Accordingly, there is a need for a personal relationship management system that addresses certain problems found in existing technologies.